


hayloft

by finstgirl



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, also she's black. she and gideon are black, it's harrow realizing she's gay but lowkey, this takes place i guess sometime in the middle of book 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:15:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27520618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finstgirl/pseuds/finstgirl
Summary: my girlfriend made me do this and also titled it go show him love @abeorabel
Relationships: Dulcinea Septimus/Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 1
Kudos: 23





	hayloft

**Author's Note:**

> god help my soul i haven't written fanfiction in two years

Dulcinea's eyes were a deep blue, much like the bottomless bodies of water that surrounded the whole Canaan House, and they were a startling (if not, she wanted to say, wholly unwelcome) change from the black-and-white pages Harrow had been poring over prior to interruption by the necromancer from the Seventh House.

She imagined this was what swimming felt like.

"I feel like I never see you," Dulcinea said. "I had to seek you out myself. I haven't had to do that for almost anyone else, sans the two from the Eighth, although they aren't as interesting as they probably think they are. They're _dreadfully_ boring, I must admit."

"Perhaps," Harrow replied, with all the tact of a person who has just been handed the phone when they explicitly requested the opposite. "I can't say that their interesting qualities, or lack thereof, has been any sort of impediment to my work here."  
  
"Of course not," Dulcinea replied smoothly. "I daresay more people are trying to find _you_ than the other way around. I wonder what makes you so difficult to find...Perhaps it's your dark robes, or that you're always buried in and under so many books..."

Harrow (correctly) perceived this as a slight against her small stature, which irked her slightly more than she cared to admit. It wasn't like she had any particular sort of control over her height, and it wasn't like Dulcinea was much taller seated––from her slightly slouched position, they were almost exactly eye to eye. And yet, a small part of her brain felt flooded with shame at this immutable characteristic of hers. She turned back to one of the aforementioned thick and dusty tomes and searched for her place prior to interruption, when––

"Harrowhark Nonagesimus," Dulcinea said softly, with a reverent sort of awe. She gently guided Harrow's painted face towards hers with a soft hand and let it rest there cupping her chin; it was much, much softer than she expected. She almost wanted to lean into it and rest for a long, long while. "You have such a beautiful face. I envy it, almost." Their eyes met, Dulcinea's rising up (from her lips!?), and she thanked God, or the Emperor, or both, or neither, that she (in service to her House) dutifully caked her face each morning under at least two pounds of makeup. With eyes alight, Dulcinea mused: "I wonder what it is that _you're_ looking for..."

This was too much for someone whose extent of interpersonal interaction was thinly veiled death threats and, at _most_ , reverent handshakes. She promptly rose from her semi-slouched position (which honestly hurt her back more than it should have) and, without a word, stormed out of the dusty library, choking somewhat on the way out.

As a result of the overwhelming attention, she much less floated down the halls and instead stomped through with great vigor as if the rattlings of the formerly untouched mysteries within the walls would drive out any unnecessary thoughts (or complicating feelings) in her mind.

Unfortunately, due to this wildly atypical amount of noise, she startled Gideon awake. Under normal circumstances, this would fall somewhere between the range of "mild inconvenience" and "vague annoyance." But this was not "normal circumstances," or even "somewhat-pleasantly-out-of-the-ordinary circumstances," and so, faced with a girl driven almost _entirely_ by instinct, Harrow once again found herself trapped quite neatly between a rock (in this case, the doorway housing the old wooden door to their shared dormitory) and a hard place (here the undeniable and unavoidable... _sturdiness_ of her cavalier). She had never really acknowledged her in totality before, but she found it impossible not to now, eyes flickering desperately from where they roughly met sculpted abs, down to strongly defined calves and thighs, then, flustered, racing up to where Gideon stood, arms held taught, raising aloft a sword that neared Harrow's height and likely weighed twice as much (although you wouldn't have guessed from how natural it looked there). It seemed that anywhere she looked deepened the grave she was digging herself.

"Oh, _shit_ \--Oh," Gideon said, seeming not to notice. "It's just _you_. You're never that noisy. Just because I'm faking your stupid vow of silence doesn't mean you have to test me on it by making a metric fuckton of noise."

Harrow whirled around in order to stop her brain from processing that Gideon looked like one of Ortus's protagonists sprung to life. "I'm just...keeping you on your toes. Anyway, your playmate–" she said this with all the disgust she could muster about Dulcinea, which, honestly, wasn't a lot– "was looking for you in the library. It seems she misses her old toys."

And with that, her heart pounding and face hot, she strode out of the room with a frantic sort of abandon, her robes trailing behind her.


End file.
